


Last Communion

by Mama_Nihil



Category: Ghost (Sweden Band)
Genre: End of the World, Goddamnit Prequelle, I have a life you know, I'm not pulling my punches, M/M, Not literally, Papa III as a university professor, Vampires, but death and disease, don't read this if you don't like blood, rewrite of a flop, rrrrats!, you know you want it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-25
Updated: 2018-06-25
Packaged: 2019-05-28 08:50:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15045359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mama_Nihil/pseuds/Mama_Nihil
Summary: Let your blood lead the way.A worldwide disease has all but wiped out humankind. Only a few people survive, the doctor’s son among them. But there’s something wrong with him: he no longer wants to eat. Is he finally dying too?The answer is as unexpected as it is horrible: one night, his old university professor turns up at his family's house and helps him discover a new hunger – a mindless craving for blood. Horrified at himself, he flees into the night, but where he tries to find sanctuary, he's no longer welcome. As he starts to realize that even a predator can become prey, he follows his old professor to his flock of ‘Confirmands,’ a weird group of people who might just be his ticket to survival.There’s just one problem: how can the Confirmands stay alive if the rest of humanity dies out?





	Last Communion

The first time we met, I thought I was dying. I’d been lost in the fog inside my mind, shadows of dead friends flitting across my inner vision, when something made me look up. A movement in the street where nothing ever moved nowadays: a stranger, creeping between abandoned houses – looking for food?

My stomach clenched, but I didn’t say anything, didn’t alert my mother. I just followed the dark shape with bleary eyes, trying to blink him into focus. Him? Yes, it must be. It wasn’t so much the cut of his jaw or his square shoulders – I’d known enough people not to make assumptions – but somehow I just knew. The way I knew I didn’t want my mother to see him.

I glanced at her, and caught her eye. Her face tightened. Did she guess? Did she know there was someone out there, on the prowl? A gentle executioner come to save us from the living hell that was the Condition?

That’s what we called it. The Condition, with a capital C. As if a meaningless term like that could ever conceal the horrible reality of it. As if by giving the monster a cute name, we could rid the streets of all those burning corpses.

Hoping to distract my mother from our coming doom – because if she knew, she might try to stop it – I turned my attention to my food. I picked up my fork with a hand that felt weak and slithery, and tried to muster an appetite for the scraps that lay wobbling on my plate. Tinned ham and a dollop of condensed milk. Nothing else. But it was more than most people got, because my mother had Connections.

Another big C word.

My fork pierced the ham, sank into it like teeth. Lifting the small piece of meat to my lips, I gaped wide. Each movement exact and laborious, like someone relearning their life after a stroke. The non-smell wafted up at me and my stomach turned, but even without looking, I could feel my mother watching me. Waiting. Her patience a thin veneer over a yawning chasm of rage.

I had to eat. For her.

I pushed the meat into my mouth and started chewing. The ham was squishy like rubber, but I managed to swallow without gagging. I used to be a vegetarian. No more. Now we all ate what we could get – except my mother, of course. She was the constant exception to the rule. She still stuck to her gluten-free diet like the martyr she was, despite the end of days happening all around her. And I knew what she would say if I questioned her about it: _My dear boy, if I didn’t keep to my diet, the villi in my ileum would atrophy, and I would absorb less nutrients. Why would I willingly kill myself when we’re already starving?_

And she was right, of course. As usual.

I glanced at the window again. The stranger was still there, still tracing a meandering path through our neighborhood, head raised as if he was sniffing the air. A shiver ran through me as I watched him follow some olfactory trail to the house across the street. He didn’t look sick. He looked strong, vibrant. It was such an unusual sight that I couldn’t stop a twinge of longing. To feel that life force inside me one last time…

“Let’s see if there’s any news,” dad muttered and clicked on the remote. The woman that flickered to life on the screen looked hollow. One step away from the grave. Strange how some people almost seemed to thrive on the catastrophe. As if adversity brought out their noble side. That news anchor would die on her post rather than give up. Laudable, but what was the point? There was nothing to report. No answer to the riddle – not even the shadow of an answer. Just new deaths.

The statistics of Armageddon.

It had a scientific name, of course. The Condition, I mean. It made it a little less frightening, perhaps: if there was a scientific name, sooner or later science would save us from it. It wasn’t just a Black Death, come out of nowhere to wipe us out. Someone was actually studying it, battling it.

But the name revealed our ignorance: hyperlipidemic cachexia. It sounded fancy, but it wasn’t. It only meant we had high levels of blood lipids but were still starving. Our cells just wouldn’t absorb the fat. That was all they’d managed to find out so far: we could drink oil or chew pure butter, it didn’t matter. The fat still passed unchanged through our bodies. It wanted nothing to do with us.

At the start, we didn’t know it was one single illness. The deteriorating night vision that spread like an epidemic through all layers of society; the hair that fell out; the eczemas; the cramps and the bleeding. They seemed like wildly different diseases. After a few months, someone put two and two together and realized that all these symptoms were connected. Not that it helped, but at least it gave a face to the enemy: hyperlipidemic cachexia. The disease to end all others.

On screen, the news anchor was interviewing a politician, pearls of sweat on his brow. By his side, a food company CEO was squirming at the ill-disguised insinuation that it was somehow his fault. Some glitch in the production process. They always did this: hunted for scapegoats, for someone to hang in public. I guess it gave us something to focus on. Someone to bear the burden.

“There’s no reason to suspect the food,” the CEO was saying, voice aiming for authority. “This is a typical witch hunt, born of ignorance. We’re actually working to save people, I’d have you know. We have a commitment to end world hunger, and…”

I zoned out and put a forkful of condensed milk into my mouth. Why they still bothered to talk about solutions was a mystery to me. We were all going to die, and the sooner we accepted that, the better.

Except my mother. Somehow I couldn’t picture her dying. In my mind, she would stand there on a pile of dead bodies, alone at the end of all things. No one to treat anymore, no one to lecture about their food habits.

Onscreen, the CEO was shuffled off into the wings and the National Food Agency made their weekly appearance. They had nothing new to say, just the usual advice to find sugar, however expensive it was. As if everyone wasn’t already doing just that. As if they didn’t actually murder people for a piece of candy.

My eyes were drawn to the window again, but the man was nowhere to be seen. Disappointment welled in me: maybe he’d left. Maybe today wouldn’t be the day I found release.

“It’s an illusion,” my sister said, and we all started.

My mother’s face softened. “What is, dear?”

“That you don’t want to eat. You’re hungry, really. It’s just an illusion that you’re not.”

It was more words strung together than I’d heard her utter since this whole nightmare began. I struggled to find something to give back to her, something to honor the moment, but choked on the things I wanted to say. She was my sister, and I was supposed to protect her. But who could protect anyone from the Condition?

“Of course it’s an illusion, darling,” my mother said, reaching over the table to pat her daughter’s hand. “Remember how it was for your poor cousin.”

Silence fell as we all remembered the first victim of the family. Our cousin, euphoric that she’d finally got into her skinny jeans. She’d never been fat, and yet she’d always hated the gentle swell of her thighs and hips. She’d proved a bite-sized snack for the Condition, and to the bitter end, she’d seen it as a blessing.

Now don’t get me wrong. She wasn’t stupid. Or if she was, we all were. We just didn’t understand – couldn’t grasp the enormity of it. Those early weeks were just so confusing. I mean, we’d always avoided fat and sugar like the obedient little middle class health freaks we were, and now this? It just didn’t sink in that the kilos we lost were not a good thing. Instead we were all delighted by how well our latest diet seemed to be working. Most of those early deaths were willing victims. The long-elusive grail of thinness was finally within reach. We were _happy_. And turning a ship that had been heading in one single direction our whole lives proved almost impossible. We just kept going, convinced that we were on a righteous path.

Not until the hospitals filled with corpses did we catch on, and then it was too late. When we finally started raiding our cupboards for sugar and butter and bread in a desperate scramble for safety, the Condition had us by the balls. It didn’t matter how much we ate. The kilos dropped off us like water, pulled by the gravity of the situation. Nothing stuck. Nothing. We crammed food into our mouths, but even when we were full to bursting, the hunger stayed with us.

With time, we got used to it. The empty ache became almost comfortable. That’s how most of them went: they simply gave up eating. Didn’t see the point of it any longer. They took to their beds and awaited their fate in dull resignation.

But not us. We were still here, after a summer of chaos and death, still sitting down to dinner every night, still injecting our vitamins: a defiant finger at Fate.

I pushed my plate away. Ham and condensed milk – what a joke. This was supposed to save me? My death sentence was already signed and sealed. Nothing I did could change that.

There was a sharp bang, and I jumped. My mother was staring at me, rage in her eyes, her hand lying flat on the table where she’d slammed it. I was about to say something when she lunged, grabbed my hair and pulled my head back, staring into my face. I was too surprised to fight back. Because what was she going to do? Kill me? For a single ice-cold moment, the thought flashed through my brain: maybe she was one of _them_ now – the crazy ones. Maybe this was it: she would rip my throat open right there, in front of dad, my sister and brother…

And then our eyes met. Hers were terrified. She wasn’t crazy at all, just desperate. A new kind of fear, one I couldn’t decipher. As if I’d been transformed before her very eyes. As if, when she stared into my face, she saw not her eldest son, but a complete stranger.

Her hand was still in my hair, clutching a clump of it. Was she thinking the same thing I was? That my hair wasn’t falling out anymore? My lips moved, ghosting a question, and her eyes darted down to my mouth. I closed it, but the twitch in her cheek was proof enough: she’d seen. Her fingers tightened at the back of my head. Was she going to ask me outright? Interrogate me in front of our family, demand explanations I didn’t have?

No. Her hand relaxed a little. For a moment I even thought I was off the hook, but I should have known my mother. Even in the middle of Ragnarök, she was mindful of appearances. She couldn’t let an assault like that go unexplained. Before anyone could ask, she reached for the condensed milk. Digging her fingers into it, she brought a squishy handful to my face. “Eat.”

I recoiled. She was _not_ going to force-feed me from her bloody hand. It was humiliating enough to be back in my childhood home after seven years of living alone – I was still lord of my own body, right?

Wrong.

Sudden pain stabbed at my lips, made me open up. Her fingers were clever and long-nailed, and they pushed inside my mouth – way, way back, horrid warm sweat mingling with the milk. I couldn’t help it: I retched. The paltry crumbs I’d forced down earlier came up in a cascade of bile. It spattered on her, on the table, on me. I stared at the vomit, at my own speckled hands. I was a twenty-seven year old man living with my parents, my mother had just tried to manually push condensed milk down my throat, and I’d responded by throwing up on her. We really had come a long way, hadn’t we?

Dad sprang up from his chair. “What the hell, Elizabeth?”

She took a step back and looked down at her soiled shirt, beige clumps dripping from it. My sister gave a small wail and rocked herself, while my brother just stared at her through cloudy eyes, a thin string of dribble hanging from his chin. Steadying myself with a hand on the table, I tried to blink away the sludge in my head. I wanted to finish the job, to empty myself completely. I still had half-digested food in my stomach, food that didn’t want to be there. But maybe I shouldn’t? Nausea was one of the symptoms of the Condition, and so was the bone-deep weariness. I shouldn’t give in to it. Maybe if I ignored it, it would go away?

But somehow I knew that wasn’t it. The weight in my skull had nothing to do with starvation. I’d gone hungry for months, I should know the difference. There was something else going on inside me, something that roiled and shivered and screamed for something I couldn’t put a finger on. A new weakness was rising in me, a cold wave without a name.

And there was the smell. Thick, warm, compact. A smell like nothing I’d ever known – and yet familiar like the lines in my own hand. It was all around me, sultry and dense, caressing me with its revolting sweetness. It disgusted me and it called to me. It wanted _inside_ of me.

That did it. I stumbled from my chair to the bathroom. Vision lost in a fog, I managed to brace myself with one hand on the toilet seat before I sank to the floor and coughed up the last remnants of my meal. As if an otherworldly force squeezed the very life out of me. When I was done, I collapsed with my back against the wall, pulling deep, greedy breaths into my lungs. Fresh, untainted air. The cold smell of porcelain and soap. Nothing to tempt me, nothing to clog my nose with drug-like confusion.

And then, a shadow. For a moment I thought – hoped – that it was the stranger, that he'd finally come to end me, but even before I looked up I knew it wasn’t.

It was just Dad standing in the doorway. “Are you okay?” he asked.

I couldn’t help a laugh. “Never better.” I tried to peel myself off the floor, but I still felt woozy. Dad held out a hand, and I shied away. His skin was just too warm, too… alive. I didn’t want to touch him. It felt dangerous somehow.

“I just need…” I made a vague gesture. What did I need? Something without a name.

“Maybe you should try to get something down. Perhaps drink something? They say it’s easier when… you know.”

Yes, I knew. When nothing else worked, when you were so close to the end your body had given up, that was the advice they gave. Drink something sweet. But I didn’t want to. The mere thought of the raspberry squash my mother had scrounged off the black market made my insides roil again.

Hoping to clear my head, I got up and dabbed my face with cold water. “I’m fine,” I muttered. As I said it, a kind of calm spread through my body. Yes. I was, wasn’t I? Fine. The fogginess was gone, and so was every last shred of hunger. As if a spell had been lifted.

I didn’t look up at the mirror. Didn’t want to have the feeling shattered by what I knew I would see: my own bottomless pupils, stranded in a gaunt face that was too pale even for a hundredth-generation Scandinavian. Instead I just wiped my hands on a towel, movements controlled and exact. Dad lingered in the doorway, perhaps to avoid going back to the dining room. My mother would be polishing the mahogany, her hands frenetically working a dish cloth over the gleaming surface. Or was she lapping up the contents of my stomach with her naked tongue?

No. Not her. She might be forcing the rest of us to eat what she wouldn’t have given our dog six months ago, but she would never stoop that low herself. She didn’t have to. The Condition had been kind to her, and she could afford to be choosy.

“Darling.” As if summoned by the thought, she appeared, needle in hand.

At the sight of it, I winced. “Please…” I groaned, but there was no force behind the word. I knew I didn’t stand a chance.

“You didn’t eat, so you have to take your vitamins.” She grabbed my arm – a rough grip: angry. But it wasn’t my fault she’d pushed her disgusting fingers down my throat and made me throw up.

Not that it mattered whose fault it was. Nothing mattered. She was in charge anyway.

She dabbed my skin with alcohol, and I watched with dull apprehension. I knew what she was thinking. _I work my ass off to save this family, and all you can do is court death._ A strange mix of the vulgar and the poetic, that was my mother.

The needle pierced skin, and I couldn’t prevent an in-breath. She gave me a look of pure contempt, but she didn’t comment. She never did nowadays. We’d agreed to disagree on this particular subject. She could go on thinking I was a sissy – _oh yes, the sensitive type, you know, wink, wink_ – and I made no attempt to contradict her. I didn’t have a low threshold for pain. I could take quite a lot of it, most of the time. But coming from _her_ …

She withdrew the needle and I breathed out, but when I tried to walk away, her grip on my arm tightened. “One more.”

I frowned. One more? One more what?

A new needle appeared in her hand.

“What is it?”

She didn’t look at me, just stuck the thing into my already punctured skin and pushed it deep. A raw squeal tore through my throat – again, it didn’t exactly hurt, it was just… the _helplessness_. She met my gaze, and I could see her relishing it: the power. When I looked at the needle again, I saw a dark red pillar rise inside the cylinder. My blood.

My blood!

She was _stealing_ it, drawing it out of me. Sucking me dry. My chest heaved, but no sound made it through my throat. Darkness, the same darkness that always hovered at the edges of my vision, closed in on me. The floor came up to meet me. Hard, flat and cold.

I was out.

Blackness, blackness everywhere. And in the blackness, a voice. A random memory from my first year at university, when I’d mooned over that intense-looking professor with the black hair. The way his eyes had seemed to follow me wherever I went, the way his bespoke tailoring clung to his limbs. The softness of his voice when he chastised us.

And then – too soon – I surfaced to her irritated breathing. I felt her hands put some kind of band aid on my arm. Rough, impatient movements, like a rebuke. My head was pounding where my temple had hit the tiles, tracing an old vein of agony behind my face. It burned in vertical lines just above my mouth, along my nose, up to my eyes, all the way into my fontanels. Long since healed, but still smoldering, pulsing.

Have you ever had teeth filed down? Then you know.

The bathroom ceiling took form above me. I could hear dad’s voice, fussing, and my mother’s telling him not to worry. Her hands were stroking my cheek, calling me back from Hades, making maternal little sounds of distress. “I had to do it, darling. Of course you fainted, it’s because you don’t eat.”

I tried to nod: a dash of the Stockholm syndrome, perhaps. She helped me sit up, and dad looked into my eyes, attempting sternness: _Tell me what happened_. But I would never tell. He didn’t even know about that dentist. I mean, what would be the point? It was all in the past.

“Can you eat now?” my mother asked. The question was so ridiculous I wanted to laugh, but the laugh came out a wheeze, and she took it as a yes. Too weak to object, I let her hoist me to my feet and lead me back to the dining room. Just now, I’d felt so strong: the hunger had left me, the dizziness, everything. But she’d ruined all that. Now I was back in starvation limbo, boneless like a slab of meat. Maybe the feeling I’d had, the feeling of strength, had just been my dying mind trying to comfort itself. Like when you freeze to death, and your cells explode for a final illusion of warmth.

Was that what had prompted my mind to dredge up that voice, too? That face?

_The one that got away._

I frowned as I sat at the table again. I hadn’t thought about that man for years. Why would I? He’d just been my teacher for half a semester, nothing more. Yeah, he’d had that eerie, alluring quality, and yeah, I’d had his stern frown on my retinas while I jerked off, but come on. That was ages ago. Why did my brain suddenly think a random university professor could comfort me in my hour of need?

But even as I scoffed at the thought, there was a tingle in my groin. He really wasn’t that random. If anyone looked like the personification of beautiful death, he did. Maybe imagining him as the reaper would make the transition easier.

I stiffened, a brightness rising inside me. That jaw, those shoulders… With a gasp, I looked out of the window just as the man I’d seen earlier walked up our path, heading straight for our door. It was _him_. Impossible, laughable, but my subconscious had made the connection before my waking mind could: the approaching angel of death was my old professor.

The door creaked. A moment’s hesitation – then I ran to the hallway, hurrying to reach it before my mother. I almost slipped on the mat as I rounded the corner, and there he was. Christ, there he fucking was, in the flesh, too real, too compact somehow. Like density in human form, like a concentration of life itself.

And quick like a bird of prey, he flew at my throat. Claws gripped my neck and teeth flashed. The smell of blood filled my nostrils – the blood of a dozen victims, like a morbid souvenir on his breath. I almost cried out –

And then everything stopped. Wild eyes stared at me, shock and confusion in their depths. I stared back, all instincts to save myself evaporated. I was caught in his gaze, hypnotized.

“I… apologize.”

The courtesy fell dead to the floor between us. I should have laughed, but I couldn’t. I was bewitched by his voice. It was smooth like cherry velvet, like the low note from a cracked cello. It reverberated through me, set me atremble. I opened my mouth to say something, and his eyes flitted down to my teeth.

I closed it again.

“Please forgive me.” He took a step back, and the pull lessened. I could breathe again. “I should know better.” He seemed shaken. “I don’t understand what happened.”

“What are you doing here?” I demanded, and my attempt to sound dominant quivered between us. I half expected him to laugh, but if something stirred in those bottomless tarns, it wasn’t mirth.

“You’re new.” Once again the sound of his voice made the hairs on my neck stand up. It was rugged yet soft, a raven-like sound that pierced my very soul. And his _eyes_ … They slid over my body in a way I would once have interpreted as seductive, but in this strange new world, who knew?

Then he nodded. “Yes, obviously. Very fresh, I should think. Not more than a few days old?”

He stepped closer again, and I choked out a hurried, “What do you mean?”

He looked down at me, sharp and alert. His scent filled me to the brim, like I wanted to fill him. My hands curled into fists at my sides. _Don’t touch. Just don’t. You know how straight guys get._

“New,” he repeated, and once again I smelled warm iron on his breath. “Saved.” His gaze dropped to the pulse just below my ear, and a warm shudder travelled through me. He gave me the strangest look, head poised as if sniffing the air again. Did he smell it too? The horrible soup of olfactory sweetness that clung to our house like mud?

At that moment, my mother appeared behind me. “Who…?”

The man’s eyes flitted over my head. “Good evening, doctor.”

“Oh…”

“We’ve met. I was at the hospital once, for a lecture on… nutrition.”

The word hung in the hallway for a moment, shining in irony. Nutrition. Years of research, of knowledge amassed – and to what avail? We were all starving to death in the midst of abundance.

“Will you join us?” my mother asked, surprising me. “We’re having dinner.”

As if everything was normal, as if this was just an ordinary evening from Before, when you invited guests to eat their fill at your table. Back when hospitality was offered, not taken by force.

“I’ve eaten,” the man said, but his voice was hollow now, fake. “I just… need somewhere to stay tonight.”

I knew he was lying, but I couldn’t bring myself to say so. Maybe he was crazy, but he still possessed a shred of self-control and planned to murder us in our sleep?

Well. I could live with that.

Stepping aside, I let him enter.


End file.
